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Me, I have not even looked at Maurice, or Dragomir, or the Mighty Compadre. I have been somewhat distracted by other issues but I am slowly emerging from that and I hope to start detecting again soon.

We’ve had a few nice days this Winter but alas, I couldn’t make it out.

This year I am really aiming at buying a new detector. I have spoken about it before and no, I am not abandoning the XP Deus. I have been searching for a detector for a very specific type of hunting. I thought I had it with the Blisstool but although the machine delivers what it promises, I never used it enough last year to really extract the benefits. Meanwhile, a new Russian machine has come into play and just recently, a dealer in the U.S. began carrying it. It’s an advanced machine and this is reflected in the price. With a wife and two young ones, I have to maneuver financially to come up with the money. My plan is to work the Deus hard to raise the funds.

Anyway, if you see me out there disturbing the soil, feel free to stop by and say hi.

I went out this lunch hour in the 95+ degree weather to clean up a site that it is promising. This task was assigned to the Mighty Compadre. I just love that little power-house of a detector.

After an hour, I had a respectable amount of wire, nails, foil and even some pulltabs in my pocket. I wasn’t expecting any coins as I know those are beyond the depth capabilities of the Tesoro Compadre and its five inch coil. No matter. I considered my hunt a success. Now I can return with the Bliss and the 15 inch coil to explore the depths of that dirt.

On my way back I began to think about what a different detectorist I am today. Five years ago there is absolutely no way I would have done what I just did. No way José. So what’s different?

I believe the answer is that I stopped being a treasure hunter and became a detectorist.
Wait a minute pullTab!, I hear you say; aren’t those synonyms? Well, not in my way of thinking they are not.

See, when I began to detect for fun and profit, I was really mostly going after the profit. Finding things that could not readily be turned into cash would just ruin my day. I was rather petulant about it if I am to be honest. I did not accept the reality of metal detecting; and that is that the ratio of trash to good stuff is somewhere in the vicinity of 1000/1 and in some parks around here, that’s actually a pretty good ratio!
I was in other words, hunting for treasure.

Later, as I packed in the hours detecting, I began to relax a bit and began to explore the signals for the sheer pleasure of exploring them. Don’t get me wrong, I still love that shiny silver and gold but now I can really enjoy a sortie even when all I find is junk. I believe now I can really be described as a detectorist true and through. You could say I am no longer one dimensional when it comes to our beloved hobby. I’ve grown wiser… Ok, I’ll stop making myself look good.

*** Before you read this post, read this post about the time Dick Stout spoke to Congress about our hobby. Plus, check out the eye candy. No, I am not talking about the pictures of Stout.***
I decided it was time. No more pussyfooting around. It was time to dig deeply and carry a big coil.

I am not, generally speaking, a fan of large coils. As a coin shooter, I have never found a use for them. An 11 inch coil has been the limit for me. However, with my recent acquisition of the Blisstool V3, I became the proud owner of a 15 inch coil. This thing looks comical and to quote my fellow hunter Steve Ukena, it looks as if I am compensatin’.

Yet, there is a spot at a local old park. I hunted it once or twice with no good results. This spot is a sea of bottle caps. It is interesting how some areas of our city parks will get a certain personality. Sometimes it is pull tabs, sometimes it is bottle caps, and sometimes it is both.

So I drive by this particular area and think about the next time I will hit it. You see, this area has always been open. Since the very beginning of our city’s history. It never had any structures. I know, as I have been told by someone in their 80’s, that after swimming in the river or in the municipal swimming pool that stood nearby, people would sit in this very spot and have pick nicks. I can see how this may have happened all the way back to the late 1800’s.

There is evidence that this spot has been covered with silt from the river during the many pre-1960 floods that occurred here. There is a layer of clay on top of what I surmise to be the original sand.

This has led me to believe, that the very old coins and stuff are buried deep under the silt and the bottle caps. I spent some time with the Deus and the Bliss with the 11 inch coil but I am not penetrating deep enough; thus my decision to apply the 15 inch coil to the dirt here. I did the first excursion yesterday at lunch.

I was happy with the coil’s pinpointing ability. The Blisstool doesn’t have an all metal pinpointing feature. You pinpoint the old fashion way. I like to use the front of the coil
and use the wiggle method. I tested this yesterday and was able to pinpoint relatively shallow targets with precision. Of course, I had to work spots from every direction because of the coils large footprint but this does not represent a hindrance to me. I worked to empty a large enough area to be able to manually ground balance the Bliss but although I dug 5 pieces of trash from a 2×2 area, more trash was revealed that was previously masked. Such is the ground I hunt.

Last I want to mention a phenomenon that I will call the “Now you don’t see it, now you do” syndrome. I have experienced it several times in the last 5 years. I select an area somewhere that’s utterly hopeless. I stick to it and after a number of excruciatingly painful hunts I cross a certain threshold and voila! keepers! It goes beyond removing trash; I believe it has to do with my brain getting to know the particulars of the dirt, almost as if a psychic connection is made between the site and me; as if the ghosts of the past finally break through the mist and whisper in my ear…
Laugh all you want, but I believe this is why I consistently pull silver out of certain parks where others don’t.

Anyway, it’s getting hot out there. The dirt is beginning to harden and time’s awastin’. Time to dig!

Pardon my Bulgarian. Nah! I don’t really speak Bulgarian but I did teach myself to read the Cyrillic script. Incidentally, that last word, with four characters, spells the word ‘park’ just like in English.

I returned to the deep silver park at lunch today. Now that I can ground balance the Bliss like a boss (OK, maybe not like a boss but well enough) I wanted to let my Blisstool V3 metal detector loose on a patch of park where I have gravely removed all targets but the iron. Mind you, I have removed a lot of iron as well.

Right away, I began to get nice solid signals. I am not shocked that I found the aluminum foil. In this spot, there stood a swing set from about the 30’s to the 60’s. I have found close to a hundred of what appear to be aluminum seals for old timey milk and juice glass bottles. I remember those suckers from my childhood. Somehow I missed them with the Deus. Most were at the 7-8 inch mark. They could also be from Boy Scout and Girl Scout camp outs as I have also found a good number of Scout related items at this spot in the past. They are distinctively round and gold colored.

I was rather surprised however to pull that beaver tail pull tab. I could swear there were no such signals left here. Then I found that 1946d Wheat cent. No matter how many times I declare this spot coin free, I am proven wrong. By the way, I intend to keep on posting my Wheaties. First, because I want to prove that you can use the Blisstool V3 to detect trashy parks and still find coins. Second, when I start finding the really cool stuff, and I will, I want all the haters to know I don’t plant coins for my self-glorification and if I was to do that, I most certainly would not plant Wheats from the 40’s!

I am pleased with the progress I am making with Dragomir. I have a very good feeling about this machine.

I went out this morning for a couple of hours with my Blisstool V3 metal detector to the small park I’ve been hunting lately.

My plan was simple: dig.

It is my opinion that you cannot learn and master your metal detector unless you dig a lot of trash. To train my ear, I dug and dug and dug until I could dig no more. I dug a lot of shallow targets. By doing that, I could see that the discriminator circuitry works really well when it comes to targets down to about 7 inches. I dug some deep targets too and past 7 inches the discriminator got fooled a few times but still it was impressive.

I am slowly honing in to the sweet signals. The 1910 wheat pictured above was such a signal. This tiny park still has a lot to give up, and I am just the guy to get it.

I am a coinshooter. To a coinshooter, things under the ground are either coins, or Other Than Coin (O.T.C.)

Today at lunch, I took the Blisstool metal detector, Dragomir, to the park I hunted yesterday at lunch, with the hopes of pulling that elusive Seated coin. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Instead I dug O.T.C.

This is all the OTC I dug up on my lunch hour. Generally, I don’t post about OTC unless it’s a really cool object. I wonder what the cylindrical object is. It is only one half of it. It may have been part of a cigar container. The flat brass object was in the hole with it ***UPDATE…It just occurred to me that this is the end of a pocket knife*** . The bullet case must predate the park, unless it was perfectly OK to shoot your gun at the park in 1884. Bird shot has appeared in my life again. It seems every time I get a new detector and begin to learn its language, I dig a bunch of bird shot. It sounds really good and with the Bliss, I dug those suckers at 5 and 6 inches deep. The square nail and the wire were experimental digs, just to see what the Bliss was telling me. I wonder why they didn’t get caught by the discrimination circuit.

Very early on in Wichita, the Chisholm creek ran a very close to where this park is. Just 2 or 3 blocks away, one of Wichita’s earliest mills was built at the edge of the creek. I imagine that people came hunting around the creek as wild life would have concentrated here. I have found a good number of old bullets at this park, including a large .58 caliber mini ball from a Springfield rifle.

At any rate, I am getting a little better at listening to the signals Dragomir produces. The Seateds are not far behind.

It was nice and sunny today at lunch so I took Dragomir, my Blisstool V3 metal detector to the oldest park in the city. I’ve talked about this park before. It is a small park, smaller than a city block in fact but it has produced some nice silver and other old coinage for me with a variety of metal detectors.

As far as trash, this park is at DEFCON 4. It is hard to hunt with any detector if you don’t have the patience. Definitely it is the kind of park where a small coil would be indicated. Except that the coins I am hunting are too deep for a small coil. So I must endure the cacophony of beeps.

After I successfully ground balanced the Bliss manually (I had to clean a spot using auto ground balance in order to do it) I eventually got the kind of signal I was looking for. I decided to implement the Money Maker Protocol because now that I can manually ground balance the machine, I get fooled by shallow small aluminum. At any rate after making sure that it was no shallow small aluminum I kept digging until I got to the target:

No silver but yet another old coin. 1916 D Wheat cent. No too badly worn so it must have been dropped closed to its mint date. This cent was minted when the U.S. had not yet entered WWI and Wichita was experiencing a growth boom.

With time and practice, my ears will become more attuned to the winning signals.

I have a park in our city where the coins from the 1940’s and before are buried under more than 12 inches of dirt. I know this because the coins from the 50’s and 60’s are found between 7 and 9 inches deep. Why this is is anyone’s guess.

So after I dug up more than a 100 silver coins and countless wheats and nickels from the 50’s and 60’s from my deep silver park, I began the search for a detector that could get me to the coins dropped in the 40’s and before. My choices were pulse induction (p.i.) detectors and the Blisstool. No sooner I began my search however, people began to tell me that p.i. detectors and the Bliss were not ‘park detectors‘. Whaaaat??!!

No one ever told me what a ‘park detector‘ was. To my way of seeing things, if the detector beeps when the coil is over a piece of metal, then it is a park detector; and a field detector; and a private property detector. Come on. The Tesoro Compadre is a single tone detector with no depth indicator and no visual i.d. system and NO ONE is saying the Compadre is not a park detector. On the contrary, the Compadre is a perfect park detector. So what gives?

Hunting parks in this day and age is a trying exercise no matter what machine you are using. The real question is not whether your machine is a ‘park detector’ but whether YOU are a park detector. You are the real detector (and your digger is the only 100% accurate discriminator). If you are willing to pay the price to get to the juiciest finds in our city parks, then the metal detector you use is just a tool.

I spent an hour at lunch time digging deep rusted iron and shallow can slaw with the Bliss today. It reminded me of the hours I spent digging deep rusted iron and can slaw with every other detector I have owned! I know that with patience and with time, I will learn what the Bliss is telling me and then I will begin to dig some really good stuff. I mean, I already dug up a couple of old coins with it and I have no idea what I am doing. Disclaimer: I have never known what I’m doing.

So there. I, pulltabMiner, here and now and in somewhat acceptable use of my faculties, declare that the Blisstool IS a park detector. Let it be known far and wide that I have thus spoken.

After using the Bliss for a few days I noticed somethings were not working as they should.

Never being one to blame the machine, I knew the issues were due to my inexperience with Dragomir. I reached out to a more knowledgeable Blisstool user and he gave me some pointers to properly do a manual ground balance.

I have to say, ground balancing the Bliss appears to be the biggest challenge for first time Blisstool users. I followed the manual’s advice to start on auto ground balance and was having a huge problem with false signals and with discrimination. Upon successfully doing a manual ground balance I noticed two things:
1) Auto-ground balance left my machine ‘hot’, way hotter than I would normally run it.
2) Manual ground balance was extremely easy, so long as you know that the pots, i.e. knobs, are rather sensitive.

The biggest problem with the manual ground balance was finding a spot in the park devoid of metal. I had to actually clean a two by two foot spot in order to balance Dragomir.

Having completed this task, the number of false signals dropped to near zero and I was able to discriminate fine.

So armed with Dragomir in its more stable state, I went where a road ran through an old park. The road was removed sometime in the 90’s and a person who was there at the time they removed the road, told me that they found large cents and Seated coins and so on and so forth. The beauty of this spot is that it is relatively devoid of modern trash besides being rather large area wise.

I began and hardly a signal was to be had, as I expected. Finally, I got a nice repeatable signal and I went for it. Digging there you can immediately tell there was a road in the past. There were chunks of asphalt and cement but around the 5-6 inch mark, I found the target. I could see that the chunk of asphalt and dirt I dug up was round. My heart was giddy with the anticipation of uncovering a precious Seated dime.

Give me a break! A clad dime. I can’t even tell the date because of the cement stuck to it. the reverse actually has asphalt stuck so you can’t even see it. ***UPDATE*** After soaking the dime in soft drink (cola), I can see the dime was minted in 1966.***

I put in the work. Dragomir put in the work. This was our reward. Leave it to me to find the only clad coin that was possibly dropped by a city worker at some street repair job in the past. Sigh!

On my way home, I stopped by another park and buried a dime 12 inches deep. I dug up the hole and I stuck a new shiny dime in the side of the hole at the bottom and covered it back up. I then began tinkering with the Bliss until I got a solid, repeatable signal. 12 inches. My Deus, beloved and respected as it is (it remains my go-to machine for hunting the parks)
cannot give me a solid repeatable signal on a dime 12 inches under the ground (with the 11 inch coil).

And that is the purpose of the Blisstool. The Deus will unmask a coin better than any machine out there and the Blisstool will sniff me out some of the deepest stuff. But I cannot control what was dropped in the past.

This morning at the park where I found some old coins late last year the Bliss and I dug a bunch of deep holes. After a couple of rusted iron bits and a couple of ‘holes to nowhere’ the Bliss found its first coin: a 1915D wheat. I was excited and forged on.

After leaving my soul in every hole I dug, I was beat. Digging 14 inch deep holes is hard work, especially when you never reach the target. I definitely need a relic digging shovel. Finally, the Bliss found its second coin: A toasted 189x V nickel.

I wanted to stay and find that Seated but I had promised my family I would only stay out for a couple of hours.
No matter, those deep seateds aren’t going anywhere.